So in short, the product is not immediately available (it's sold out in the Swag shop also) and when it is, it won't be $5 unless you order it direct. And then, if you don't live in the UK, you'll have to pay an assload of shipping.

Where can I buy R-Pi in a B&M store in the USA, so that I can actually get it for $5? And when will it actually be available?

I walked into Micro Center on Black Friday and picked one up for $5. While I was there, I looked around and was quite surprised how competitive Micro Center has become with pricing.

If you don't want an app to use cellular, go and turn it off. My 11 year old daughter knows how to do this since her pre-paid phone gives her about 300MB a month. For those that are on limited cell plans, you should have already been doing this before wifi assist existed.

I think wifi assist is a pretty awesome feature, no more Slack not working when I leave buildings (I travel between school buildings a lot during the day).

I don't see how they controlled for equipment getting faster. A computer in 2004 was probably a ~3Ghz Pentium 4 with a 800MHz bus and 1Gb of RAM. Now you have an i5 or i7 with an SSD that's probably 10 times faster. People just don't wait that long for their computer anymore.

(I miss the good old days when a print job got you a 15-20 minute break.)

As someone who is doing Linux in schools, let me correct a few things.
- Imaging isn't done anymore, except for a base image with nothing installed. The tools to manage machines can take care of anything that needs to be set.
- To set up our 1:1 Linux desktops we boot from the network, enter the machine name and user name, and walk away. Ubuntu installs with minimal software and Puppet. Everything else is configured through Puppet. Configuration includes software to be installed and creating the username and password of the student that is assigned to the laptop.
We haven't hopped on the Chromebook bandwagon. Linux can do everything Chromebooks can do but so much more.

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) is the largest charter school in the state of Ohio. The online school is larger than the vast majority of Ohioâ(TM)s traditional school districts and received over $88 million in state funding last school year. This year that amount is expected to jump to over $92 million.
On the latest report cards released by the Ohio Department of Education, ECOT continues to rank below all of the 8 large urban schools that are often-criticized by legislators and in the media for their "sub-par" performance.

Last year I had a student who never showed up to class, never turned work in, skimmed by on gaming the system with a phone call every few weeks, just enough to keep from being dropped from the rosters. She called me three days after my final grades were submitted in June, desperate to find a way to graduate. I apologized, said my grades had been submitted, and offered information for the summer school we were holding. A week or so later, when I arrived for graduation an administrator pulled me aside to tell me that this student had passed "by the proficiency method" and would be graduating. Our graduation rate was so low that this was not a surprise to me, not after the year I had spent working in this system.

I think most of the comments about A players are defining them incorrectly. An A player is one that:

- is competent in their skills and is continually upgrading their skillset- works well with others, viewing criticism not personally. The A player uses criticism to get better- will go the extra mile(s) so their projects and the company will be a success. No task is too menial. When they walk down the hall they will pick up any trash they find to throw away.- is humble- is not afraid of failure

In education, you see A players all the time. These are the ones you want to work with and work for. They make you better.

Puppet can also run with out a server. You can clone your puppet repo and simply run "puppet apply main manifest.pp"
The server gives you more control over what the machine receives, so each machine wouldn't have access to items such as ssh keys or user info that doesn't pertain to the machine.

This is a simple question about owning the intellectual property rights on material produced. Frankly the way I think this should be is that I own the copyright but the university has a permanent license to use any material I generate for education of its own students.

This has already come up under teacherspayteachers.com. Any work you do for your job would most likely fall under "work-for-hire" and your employer, the univiersity, owns the copyright. This whole article is written by someone who doesn't realize that professors don't own the copyright on materials produced by the professors for their job.

Public school districts own the copyright on the lesson plans and supporting materials created by teachers, this is now different at the higher ed level.

If you are going to do this, then why even let the user choose their password? Use an algorithm to create user's passwords (for example, randomly select a length, then randomly generate a password). Guaranteed strong passwords.

Yes, users will write it down. Is this worse or better than what is happening now?

(For the most part, I prefer OAUTH. I let Google handle the two factor authentication.)

As the IT director for a school district, are are looking at the ASUS X201E running Ubuntu for a 1:1 program. Say what you want about Chrome books, they have opened eyes in our district. It would have been a really hard sell before. Now its easy. The Ubuntu laptops can do everything a Chromebook plus more.